Product Leaders as Curators & Editors

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A few years ago, I wrote a few posts to outline the requirements for exceptional product leadership:

While I have been gratified that people continue to find utility and value in these posts, I’ve come to believe that product leadership, particularly the issue of prioritization and phasing of a product roadmap, remains daunting and challenging for most teams.

In particular, the need for organizational scalability and speed of innovation has driven the widespread popularity of small, independent teams building product and features. Unfortunately, the side effect of the explosion of small teams has also amplified user-experience fragmentation and the haphazard quality of many web-based and mobile software applications.

As a result, I’ve come to believe that there are two facets of  product leadership that have become increasingly important for delivering a high quality product experience: curation & editorial.

Curation Amplifies Your Product Experience

Around 2014, I remember first being struck by a product management job description at Pinterest which incorporated the concept of curation as a core responsibility of product management.

The dilemma of product prioritization is always simple to understand: most software teams, filled with talented people, have more ideas for great features that the capability to execute. As a result, there has to be some process for filtering down the ideas to answer the question of “what do we build next?”

Prioritization on metrics, customer requests and delight is not hard to operationalize, but it still leaves open critical questions:

  • How does the product & experience come together for the user after we ship?
  • How does the product communicate the changes to the customer in way they can easily understand and utilize?

I believe curation is the key to answering these questions.

Curation is an under-appreciated skill in software design. In the world of art, curation is a critical and valued function. A curator ensures that the pieces of art not only combine to amplify each other collectively, but also gives thought to the experience a viewer will have when engaging with the collection.

Users need some level of coherence in new versions of your product. With proper curation, features and changes amplify each other, and lead to a greater customer appreciation of your efforts through a product experience that is more coherent and easier to communicate.

Without curation, software feature prioritization tends to devolve purely into the line-item value of a given feature, rather than how it fits in general with the whole product, or the product release. Great curators won’t think twice about cutting a piece that doesn’t fit the theme of the show, even if it is exceptional.

Designers, not surprisingly, tend to intrinsically understand the value of curation, and valiantly attempt to connect features together into a coherent product experience. Unfortunately, they often are forced to incorporate together a hodge-podge of features that have been prioritized independently by different small teams.

This is not an argument against constant enhancement and iteration of code, or the constant shipping of bug fixes and small feature enhancements. But for user-facing features, teams need to be wiling to hear from product leadership that a great idea for a new feature is not enough to qualify it for immediate prioritization. Customers cannot endlessly absorb a haphazard array of changes and feature enhancements. The perceived quality of the product drops, and customers fail to perceive the value in the features that are shipped.

Every Creator Needs an Editor

Understanding the value of editorial comes easily to professionals who have worked in content & design.

In my experience, many otherwise talented engineers and product managers balk at receiving critical review of their work. Sure, most software engineers understand the value of pair programming and code reviews. But for some reason, when it comes to overall feature design, the sentiment almost always shifts to stubborn independence.

Unfortunately, just like in writing, having a great editor is essential for the overall quality  and consistency of the finished work.

Even the best writers benefit from having a great editor. J.K. Rowling may have written all seven Harry Potter books herself, but she had a team of editors ensuring everything from line level quality to the plot consistency of the overall series.

Why editors? In general, editors provide three levels of assistance to writers: proofreading (spelling, punctuation, grammar), copy-editing (phrasing, style), and developmental-editing (plot, character development, pacing, tone, and effectiveness.)

Most writers at first balk at the idea of an editor. They are professionals, after all, and incredibly skilled. Why do they need someone in between them and their readers?

The answer is two-fold: first, editors provide a more objective “second-pair of eyes” not affected by the sunk cost and confirmation bias inherent in any creative process, and second they are typically individuals who are exceptionally talented at finding errors and issues that will be perceived by the target audience.

The same applies to software products.

Even exceptionally talented engineers & designers become blind to their own work. While each function can have their own version of an editorial process, my experience has been that if product leadership doesn’t actively engage in the editorial process, the quality and the coherence of the product suffers.

Product Leaders as Curators & Editors

Most software companies have moved to a bottoms-up, distributed organization process for their engineering, design & product teams. Amazon, of course, is famous for their two-pizza team concept. As a result, the need for curation and editorial to keep the product experience coherent has become critical.

If you look critically at organizations that have a distributed culture, but still ship high quality product experiences, you’ll find that there is an accepted culture of curation & editorial in their product process, connecting all the way to the CEO.

If you are a product leader, think carefully about how you can incorporate curation & editorial into your process as you scale.